-Walk past the traffic that's always on Blackswarth road to get down onto the Avon river path. Someone's dumped a 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks' boardgame near the path entrance and the quiz cards are scattered everywhere.
-In front of me are two guys maybe on a walking date, or a walk the morning after a succesful date. One describes to the other growing up in Burnham-on-Sea; "Everything's grey, the estuary's disgusting, and it kills people every year... there's three lifeboats named after drowned little girls... It's all very melancholic."
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| The Little one yaps at every passing dog on the river path. |
-As soon as I started down Blackswarth Road I have 'No Diggity' by Eminem in my head.
-Trees in form of towering majesty against the blue sky. Blossoms in bursts. sounds of tiny wings and river babble. willows cracked, fallen, surviving regardless where they may. barely half an hour in I buy a coffee, a compulsion more than a need. something to hold and sip and pretend for a minute I'm strolling lightly.
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| View South-East across the Avon coming up to Hanham lock from Crewes Hole |
-Squabbling and chattering from the heronries perched atop the absolute height of some willows on the south side of the river, one of the birds nestled against the bone-white of a standing dead ash vulture-like.
-The sudden alienness of a poplar plantation, tall and straight and ordered among the lively tumble of green all around. I'd always thought there something abandoned feeling about this small plantation. There's a ruined building close by as well.
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| The Small Plantation of Poplars, Incongruous with its wild woodland surroundings. |
-After listening to a podcast series about the Norman conquest of England, I look around at the fecundity & fertility of these hills and rivers and see what the Norse, Normans, Danes, German tribes, Romans, all came for; there own lands lacking or suffering. Across the river a new build estate on a flood plain; this is what we've done with it.
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| Along the Avon after Hanham lock. |
-I take the unfamiliar path alongside the river Chew out of Keynsham, passing through a mausoleum-like converted mill where my footsteps echo and there are myriad signs forbidding entry.
-Burble of the river consumed by the quiet of the fields between Keynsham & Compton Dando. Just birdsong, flies, pheasant calls, all birds, trees creaking, the very distant and occasional sound of rushing cars.
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| The path lined in the golden flowers of buttercups. |
-I'd previously done this walk in maybe June or July, and am now struck by all the May flowers. Pinkish haze of a patch of flowering grass in a meadow.
-For a brief moment the path takes a dive up out of the sun-baked fields into a woodland. I'd been here before, and a lot of trees have come down since then. Heavy smell of garlic, as the woodland floor is covered in wild garlic, giving out scent to the air as it goes to seed and wilts in the dry sun. I hear mice rustle & squeak away in the undergrowth at the sound of my footsteps.
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| A willow completely falling apart, exposing the heartwood. |
-Coming downhill into Woollard I pass through a sheep paddock. It is the closest cropped field of this entire journey, nothing left to even hint at a meadow. All been cows until now. Then I pass the alpacas sleeping or grazzing at Bell Farm. Radio 4 playing in an empty wood shed with a red massey ferguson tractor. Geese eating grass under an orchard. A couple of geese eating vegetation on the bank of the Chew as I pass over the bridge, like a Ladybird book snapshot, except when I start crossing the bridge they immediately hiss until I'm well away.
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| Bell Farm alpacas. |
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| Geese in the Chew at Woollard. |
-Swim in a pool of the Chew by an old bridge.. It's a lovely, deep cold, felt in the bones and joints. My first river swim of the year. I find a decades old crushed can, with a triangular opening, and the rubber heel of an old boot, still with jack nails, an imprint reading "Fussells of Somerset."
-Serious blisters starting to set in now. Because I'd set in my head that I was doing this walk in a day rather than making camp anywhere, I had kept to a high pace. If I'd thought I was walking all the next day as well, I would have probably stopped more, taken my shoes off to let my feet breathe and rest, applied plasters as soon as I felt the slightest rub. But no; I just powered through. That being said, I walked the short stretch from the swimming hole in Woollard to the field gate, and the grassy, earthen path compacted flat by walkers felt extremely pleasant underfoot.
-A tiny stretch of road is swallowed up in someones private property in Compton Dando, blocking off one foot path from another, meaning that you have to completely circumvent the entire village. It's only small and quite pretty, but still, it doesn't feel right.
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| Circled in red is the small stretch that is gated off, forcing a complete circumnavigation of the village to continue onward. |
-Less notes on the backwards leg. The cold dip in the Chew and the new pain from my blisters quieten my thoughts. I walk up the hill in Keynsham, devour a snickers, and get the train to Temple Meads accompanied by two screaming babies. When I get off the train, my blisters have kicked up the pain a notch, and so the longest feeling stretch become the 10-15 minute walk from Temple Meads to my front door.
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